JUST WHAT’S ENOUGH for this outdoor stage to have presence and do its job in support of an outdoor amphitheater at the beach on the coast of southern California is an exercise in effortful trial and error and ultimately restraint (Oceanside Beachfront Redevelopment Plan, 2022)
Mathematicians and scientists search for theories and equations in which physical properties and their relationships are explained with the fewest words and symbols. Pythagoras neatly formulated how to calculate the length of a triangle’s hypotonus as the square root of the sum of the squares of its two sides. Copernicus offered a path to our understanding of the seemingly confounding movement of planets in the night sky with the simple assertion that the earth rotates on an axis and it and the other planets rotate around the sun, facilitating Kepler’s subsequent succinct explanations of planetary motion. Newton’s laws of motion explained gravity at one level of analysis (F= ma), Einstein’s general theory of relativity at another (E=mc2). With minimal means these formulations offer maximum descriptive power and maximum agency in their applicability. Mathematicians and scientists refer to them as “elegant”.
LOOKING AT THE OVERLOOKED in the everyday and everywhere is an act of focused attention that yields maximal aesthetic experience where we may have thought none existed (Photos from “Visual Inventory”, John Pawson)
MAGNIFICENCE whether visual, auditory, or otherwise is everywhere to be found if only we attend (Photos from “Visual Inventory,” John Pawson)
FAR AWAY AND CLOSE UP, ILLUSORY AND EPHEMERAL are aesthetic experiences that can be and have been reflected in and enabled by minimalist cinematic moments “(Lawrence of Arabia”, David Lean, 1962, above. “American Beauty, Sam Mendes, 1999, below)
ROADS AND MACHINES of the mid-20th century yielded novel kinds of minimalist aesthetic experiences in the everyday negotiation of our environment.
When we pay close attention to any sight, sound, or sensation we notice that which we do not ordinarily notice when our attention is otherwise turned toward scanning our environment for purposes of our negotiation and navigation of it. In the attending, we find that there are few things, if any, in the world that are boring and instead mostly beautiful once we bore into them. Visual art that facilitates this kind of experience maximizes our attention toward whatever it is it wants us to notice with the reward that our relationship with reality is enhanced and even altered. The artist invests time consuming and labor-intensive effort in extracting precisely from the world for display in the art what we are to attend to and no more. We know this as “minimalism.”
FINISH FETISH minimalist art of mid-century Los Angeles surely was established in the context of our newfound familiarity with machine finished objects in our environment such as automobiles and appliances. (John McCracke, above; Larry Bell, below)
INTENSE PSYCOLOGICAL EXPERIENCES are afforded via highly controlled visual displays that require some degree of both cessation and concentration of the mind (Rothko, left; Turrell, right)
WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT a hundred years ago that we would find ourselves engaged by the simplest of visual compositions in line, color, and plane? But having as artists and as observers of art cultivated our focus we indeed are. (Beverly Fishman above; Donald Judd, below)
Minimalist art is sometimes characterized as “difficult” because it can require effort to release ourselves from the noise of our daily distractions to first find and then attend to what it has to offer. (Rothko’s paintings do better in the context of Philip Johnson’s chapel in Dallas than they would on a wall in a restaurant); and, to our 21st century sensibilities sometimes as “elegant” because it can come off as refined, restrained and therefore dignified and graceful even though this is rarely the goal of ambitious minimalist art.
ASSERTIVE AND INVISIBLE are not words that often go together, but what other way is there to describe this kind of art? (Donald Judd, Marfa, TX)
IT IS ALWAYS THE BOX NOT THE TOY INSIDE that we as children want to inhabit and play with most; and it is in this art that it is in the relationship between objects in our environment and our bodies upon which we are beseeched to reflect (Donald Judd, Marfa, TX)
MASTERS OF MINIMALISM in architecture succeed when the cultural and environmental conditions are right (Alvaro Siza above; John Pawson, below)
THE SEVERITY OF THIS INTERVENTION is offset and rendered entirely more satisfying by the context of the courtyard within which it sits (John Pawson)
All architecture is minimalist as it is an extraction from (and abstraction of) the natural environment and all architects are therefore to an extent minimalists. But ambitiously minimalist architecture, like minimalist art, seeks to focus our attention on those aspects of our environment that we normally overlook: the serenity of uninterrupted surfaces, the gradations of shade on shaped surfaces, the textures, patterns, and juxtapositions of materials on surfaces, and the changing qualities of daylight on them. Minimalist architecture is difficult to pull off because it, like minimalist art, requires a controlled environment in which to create the desired conditions that buildings cluttered by daily use within cluttered cities rarely offer (and one reason why architects seek museum, concert hall, theater, and church commissions).
LAZY MINIMALISM in Europe relies on a pre-existing context (usually traditional urbanism and ancient artifacts) which provides the presence of content that facilitates the absence of content in the intervention (Templo de Diana, Sanchez Garcia, Merida, Spain, 2011, above; Museu Abade Pedrosa, Eduardo Souto De Moura, below)
MEAN MINIMALISM in the form of the Greek Revival in the 19th century and Miesian Modernism in the 20th century flourished in the puritan culture and harsh environment of New England and the northeast (Connecticut house above, Seagrams Building, below).
A FORCED SCHISM between what we now know to be minimalist and maximalist aesthetic experiences was an entirely a 20th century obsession (Farnsworth House, Mies van der Rohe, Plano IL,1951, above; Dawnridge, Tony Duquette, Los Angeles, CA ca 1970, below)
The modernist Mies van der Rohe was probably the first ambitiously minimalist architect. To this day we endure the famous, if by now tired and trite pronouncement “less is more” that he first uttered a century ago and subsequently manifested in his metal and glass buildings that strived to minimize mass and fuss. But what was supposed to have been elegant in its simplicity turned out to be easily dumbed down, corrupted by developer driven knockoffs and in the context of our cluttered cities, boring. Less was just less. Then we got the slightly cheeky response “more is more” probably first uttered by the maximalist Los Angeles interior designer Tony Duquette sometime in the 1970s. Interior designers never were convinced by the modernist prohibition against imagery and ornament and remained open to all aesthetic possibility—from austerity to indulgence, and everything between.
NEITHER MINIMALIST NOR MAXIMALIST the height of artistic accomplishment is achieved when complexity of content is simply and economically expressed (Madonna and Child, Raphael, 1502, left; Tempietto, Bramante, Rome, 1502, right)
NEITHER ANACHRONISTIC NOR EASILY ACHIEVED distilled and resolved artistic expression yields maximal fulfillment with seemingly minimal effort (“David”, Donatello, Florence, Italy, ca 1440, left; Gabriel, Charles Ray, Los Angeles, CA, 2021)
But while the kind of elegance offered by ambitious minimalist architecture and even minimalist effects within a maximalist context can yield satisfying visual outcomes, it is less this kind of elegance and more that which is the equivalent of the mathematician’s equation and scientist’s theorem, the kind that yields fulfilling aesthetic experiences and maximum agency with minimum means that we seek. Neither the minimalism of van der Rohe nor the maximalism of Duquette, this is the kind of elegance that welcomes and receives all manner of content—the collection and collision of a wealth of diverse and sometimes seemingly disparate ideas and imagery—while also achieving through the integration and distillation of it economically and meaningfully arranged, distinctly articulated and simply expressed compositions and environments.
FALSE STARTS are the only way to initiate a process, usually a messy and uncertain one, in which a happy resolution can ever hope to be achieved (Band shell studies, Oceanside Beachfront Redevelopment Plan, Oceanside, CA, 2022)
IDEAS EMERGE AND MERGE, they are discarded, revived, renewed, integrated and distilled through a process rarely anything less than arduous to arrive at a satisfying resolution (Band shell studies, Oceanside Beachfront Redevelopment Plan,, Oceanside, CA, 2022)
ONLY TIME WILL TELL if where one has arrived at what usually ends up a forced termination of the effort will stand the test of time. (Band shell studies, Oceanside Beachfront Redevelopment Plan, Oceanside, CA, 2022)